Home Inspector Training Advice

hi i'm reuben saltzman with structuretech home inspections and today i'm sharing with you some home inspection training advice [Music] so why am i bringing up the topic of training advice for home inspectors it's because this is without a doubt the most frequently asked question that i get as the owner of structure tech every time my office gets this call they send it to me i get a lot of phone calls i get emails i get facebook messages hey i know someone who wants to be a home inspector can i have them talk to you and of course my answer is always yes absolutely i love talking about this and i blogged about this back in 2011 and then i updated my blog in 2016 and it's time for yet another update but i figured i had to make a video to go along with it to just kind of discuss all these things so for sure the number one question that i get is how do i get training to be a home inspector what does it take and i wish there was some fantastic answers that i could give you i i think that the entire process is just a little bit broken i don't think there's any one size fits all solution how to get trained to become a home inspector the best advice i could give you would be to start with a home inspection school and that's gonna be maybe five percent of what you need to know to be a successful home inspector the rest of it is gonna be in the field training and really specialized training where you gotta you gotta get your hands on stuff but a school would be a great start the next question i get of course the logical follow-up question to that is which school i'm sorry i don't have any fantastic advice there either i took a class i attended a home inspection school a long time ago and i was not impressed with any of it so so i won't share who that school was but i've heard that there are some other schools out there that do a good job one of them is the ashy school i was on the board for the ashy school for a year or two and i think it's a well-run organization although i've never personally gone through any of the classes so i can't i can't totally attest to it but i've heard a lot of positive things from people who have gone through the school and two other schools i know of off the top of my head where inspectors at structure tech have gone through and said great things about them one is ica inspection certification associates i don't remember i'll have it on the screen when i do this video and kaplan those are a couple of other suggestions for for good schools to go to so that's a good start and then the rest of your training is going to be on-site training on-the-job training ride-alongs so of course that begs the third question how do you do ride-alongs how do you get to follow other home inspectors around and side note a lot of home inspectors get the idea that if they train somebody else to do what they do especially if it's in their market that they're going to be training the competition and they are averse to doing that they'll be like no way i ain't training anyone because they're just going to steal all my business and i can't speak to other markets i'm here in the twin cities where we have a very large market i mean there are thousands of transactions every month and my company does a very small bit of that despite the fact that we're we've grown to become the largest home inspection company in minnesota we still take a very small piece of that pie so if i train another home inspector and they go full time and they're killing it they're doing two home inspections a day every day is that ever going to be enough for me to notice even a dent in my business heck no absolutely not now if you're in a really small market and you know there's maybe two or three home inspectors for the whole town well then i could understand that a little bit so if you're in a very small market and you're trying to get training i'd say go outside of your market to get training from somebody else you probably wouldn't you're probably not going to get anyone to train you in your market but so how do you get training from another home inspector i i don't think there's a fantastic way of doing it i'd i'd say you got to make relationships you got to get on the phone you got to get in contact with people and say hey my name is reuben i'd like to be a home inspector i see you're a home inspector is there any possibility that you would let me come along as an assistant i will carry your ladder for you i'll test outlets i'll test windows i'll run water i'll flip fans on i'll go get stuff out of your truck i'll do anything you need me to do i will be your personal assistant at your beck and call for whatever you need if you will help to teach me this trade and you start offering that value proposition to somebody who you want to learn from and i'm sure you will find someone who will teach you this trade another another idea would be to make those same phone calls and offer to pay for training and if you've got a call you know 100 home inspectors finally you're going to get someone who's going to be willing to do it and let's say you offer to pay 100 dollars per ride along once you've gone on about a hundred of these you're gonna be feeling pretty good about how this goes for my company our traditional method has always been somewhere around you know maybe 120 160 inspections after they've gone through our more formal training process but still i mean let's just say you go through a hundred and you're feeling pretty good about it now you've invested ten thousand dollars compared to what you have to spend to learn other trades i'd call this a bargain so those are a couple of ideas and it's just a matter of making phone calls and then of course the really easy way to get that on-site training would be to get hired by an existing home inspection company that offers on-site training i mean that's what we do at my company we hire people all the time and we do all the training in-house but usually when people are calling me asking about this stuff they're not looking specifically for that they just want advice on how to go out on their own and then well next question would be are you hiring people ask me that all the time and yes yes we're hiring we are always hiring we're always looking to fill our bench we always want to know who the next person is if you're interested in working for us shoot us an email we'd we'd love to get to know you the next question is do you only hire home inspectors for our company no we hire people who are not existing home inspectors we we hire existing home inspectors too but ideally whoever we hire is going to be somebody who comes from the trade someone with some experience being you know a carpenter or a plumber or electrician something like that but it's not a requirement we have a fantastic in-house training program and we teach people everything they need to know another question is physical requirements what do you need to be able to do you need to be able to walk on roofs i i'd say you should be able to at least walk a 612 roof you need to be able to carry a heavy ladder now what that means to different companies is going to be different in my company we require people to transport and carry a 28-foot extension ladder that's getting way up there that's a two-story ladder a lot of home inspection companies only require one-story ladders there are other inspectors who don't even walk roofs there is no national standard of practice that requires home inspectors to even walk roofs it's generally accepted that a home inspector can inspect a roof from the ground i don't know every state's requirements but uh that that's that's the minimum requirement i i think most of the better home inspectors are going to be walking roofs that's that's definitely what we require of all of our inspectors so you need to be able to walk roofs carry a ladder a heavy ladder crawl through crawl spaces climb through attics crawl around on trusses again that's one of those things where it's not necessarily required but it's it's a good physical ability to have at my company we wouldn't consider hiring somebody who couldn't do all these basic things and then finally is how do i study what at-home studies should i do i got to school do some training but if i want to just get started today how can i do that well there's a lot of online schools to get started with but you know one of the first things i tell people is read my blog i've been blogging about home inspection topics for the last 12 years or so and maybe a year or two ago i painstakingly went through all of my existing blog posts one a week and i categorized all the ones that i thought would be good for a potential home inspector to read and dig into and then i broke them all down by section like hvac plumbing electrical roofing i got them all categorized so people can really focus in on the areas where they need the most help so that's that's a free online resource is my blog and there's a bunch of other ones where they might not be so free but there's a lot of other ones out there the national home inspector exam is a great one i'd say buy the books if you don't have them and study to take the national home inspector exam if you're planning to join ashy you need to pass that exam to to be an ashley certified home inspector and if you're in a state that has licensing there's a good chance that your state is going to require this exam not all of them do but a lot of states require the national home inspector exam so those are good books to get that's good study material another would be the the deck book it's put out by the american wood council and i think it's called dca 6 designed for code acceptance and as far as i'm concerned it's the deck building bible it shows you how to build a deck to code it's not very long it's it's like a 22 25 page pdf and it has a ton of great information on decks in there if you build the deck or you inspect a deck you need to have your hands on that document for electrical inspections i highly recommend the book electrical inspections of existing dwellings that book is fantastic it was written by some code gurus code gurus and it was written for home inspectors awesome book you need to have that in your library if you're going to be a home inspector and while we're at it you ought to have the code check library now i know there's different people say as a home inspector you don't need to know code i say not true you definitely need to know code you don't necessarily quote code i'm not there as a building code enforcement official but if i'm going to make some type of recommendation i had better be able to back that recommendation with some type of standard and that standard is going to be the building codes so it's a great base knowledge and you should have you should have access to all of your local building codes you should be familiar with all of them you should know where to find them and finally i recommend subscribing to different trade journals there's a bunch of them out there a few of my favorites are the journal of light construction the ashy reporter and the family handyman those are the three that i have delivered to my house every month i always enjoy reading all of those okay that makes up my list of the most commonly asked questions i get about getting into the home inspection field feel free to leave your comments below if i missed anything thanks for watching take care

Channel: Structure Tech Home Inspections

Views: 30,195

Rating: 4.8907318 out of 5

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Id: OK8DFqbx2d8

Length: 12min 26sec (746 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 07 2020